Biography
Christopher is married to Camilla and they live with Dante (b 25 February, 2023) and Burmese cat Figaro (b 12 December, 2021).
Rudge family history (geneaology)
On the paternal side, Rudge’s 2nd great grandfather was George Henry Rudge (b 1814), a convict who was sentenced to 7 years’ transportation for stealing two rabbits in Tewkesbury, a medieval market town and civil parish in the north of Gloucestershire, when he was just seventeen years old. George Henry Rudge was freed in 1840. He is pictured below (bottom right).
George Henry had several children, including a son named William and another named George (my great grandfather). William built a house in Burrawang, near Bowral (pictured below) in around the 1880s. It was called Hawthorn and still stands today.
My great grandfather, George Rudge, was the licensee of several hotels, including the Commercial Hotel in Taralga (c 1895-1903) and the Kenmore Hotel in Goulburn (1903-1906).
George Rudge was killed in a serious horse-riding accident in 1907, leaving his wife Julia Agnes Rudge (nee Madden) to parent their 7 children, one of whom was my grandfather, John Roy Sylvester Rudge. Julia became the hostess and licensee of the Tatersall’s Hotel in Cobar (later known as the Court House Hotel).
My grandfather, John Roy Sylvester Rudge (b 1897), who had been living in the Tatersall’s Hotel with his mother and 6 siblings, decided to go to the front in the First World War as a seventeen-year-old in around 1916. Unfortunately he was badly gassed — twice — and never really recovered. However, he did survive the war, and married my grandmother, Anne Mackey, in 1940, when he was 43 and Anne was 26. They had a son, John, my father, in 1945. John Roy Sylvester was licensee of the St James Hotel in Sydney from 1953 until around 1960. He passed away from injuries relating to expsore to mustard gas in 1963. Anne lived to 90 and passed away in 2013.
2. Hotel St James c 1950s.
I am continuing to work on my family history at this page: Rudges in Australia: A Narrative Index of Australian Descendants of Convict George Henry Rudge (b 1814). My maternal genealogy (McLaren) is Canadian and English. I maintain a public family tree on Ancestry.com here.